


a mistake in any life

by intimatopia



Series: distant countries [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Gentleness, Hurt/Comfort, Little bit of sex, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, killing roman soldiers is a love language right?, thats their story and theyre sticking to it, well thats the closest thing anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25382749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia
Summary: That fic where Nicky doesn't know how to kill and Yusuf doesn't know he deserves love even if he's a killer. (But they learn.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: distant countries [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1838203
Comments: 19
Kudos: 479





	a mistake in any life

**Author's Note:**

> i dont usually do sequels but a friend pointed out that nicky from _we know that lovers travel_ is very different from movie!nicky and i went "huh! i guess he is!" and decided to completely ignore comics canon as is my RIGHT and write a lot of whatever this is. tw for mild implied islamophobia (nothing happens to yusuf i promise)
> 
> title from [this bob hicok poem]()

They move to Nicky’s home province, east of Genova, because Yusuf said _I showed you my homeland, won’t you show me yours?_ and Nicky was, as always, helpless to say no. Not that he _wanted_ to say no. It took two hundred years or more to broker a peace that lasted, and Nicky is exhausted. Exhausted by the long summers of the holy land, the sharp rises and falls in temperature, the death and starvation he couldn’t make a dent in. Yusuf stared darkly at him when he tried, and though he always made room for Nicky in his bed, it didn’t make the weight of that regard any easier to bear.

Yusuf never tells him just what he is thinking. The thing about immortality, Nicky is learning, was that one can go a _long_ time without a necessary conversation.

Nicolo’s family house is crumbling when they get there, and though the foundations lie steady grass has grown over the carpets and rain and worms have eaten the curtains and books. Yusuf laughs, a sharp sound. “Some welcome this is,” he mutters, and Nicky blushes.

No matter how much he loves Yusuf, he isn’t fool enough to delude himself that he is loved back in the same way. Yusuf once found Nicky’s inability to kill charming. Now he thinks it a sign of weakness, and maybe it _is._ The immortals in their dreams do not hesitate to kill or even pause to think about it afterwards. And when the dreams are over, it is _Nicky_ who spends the rest of the night awake, crying silently into his hands.

The first few times, Yusuf stayed awake with him. He no longer does that.

“I guess I should get to rebuilding the house,” Nicolo says.

They _both_ build the house, tearing out the grass. Nicolo plants olive trees and rose bushes around the perimeter of their land as he remembers it, and no one comes by to question him. 

At night they sleep under the stars, or in the barn if it is raining.

The first time it rains for three days straight, Yusuf walks out into it and doesn’t come back for hours. He is soaked through when he does return, and Nicky rushes to get his sodden clothes off of him, to sit him next to the fire he’d made. “Why would you _do_ that?” he demands, voice edged with hysteria. “Where did you _go_?”

“I’ve never seen that much water in my life,” Yusuf grins.

Nicky stares at him. “Did you forget we sailed here?”

“Not from the _sky_ , asshole.”

“Oh,” Nicky says. “Well then.” And kisses him, just because he’d been worried and he can.

Yusuf’s body is as warm as ever.

The first of the olive trees has borne fruit by the time the house was finished, and Nicky wanders through the sunlit unfurnished rooms and feels a peace larger than himself for the first time in centuries. He’s like a child again, sneaking out of the house to run to the river and watch the minnows chase each other in the shallows.

He brings the olives to where Yusuf is hammering wood to make a bedframe. “Try one?” he asks, kneeling next to him. “Not as sweet as your desert fruit, but—”

Yusuf cracks a tooth on the pit, and scowls. Nicky’s heart sinks.

That night he dreams of the other two, Andromache and Quynh, and knows they are closer than ever. He dreams he is leaning over Quynh, tracing the soft swells and dips of her body, and wakes up frightened and lost.

It isn’t a conscious decision. Just that now the elation of the house is wearing off, Nicky doesn’t know if he can keep Yusuf any longer. He’s _tried,_ and Yusuf isn’t happy, and he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t feel immortal then, staring at the cloudy sky through the window. He feels miserable and worn and very, _very_ lonely.

He only meant to swim, but there is no moon and the river has changed since the last time Nicky had been here and the shallow part isn’t as shallow as he thought it was.

Drowning is the worst way to die, Nicky decides. It’s too dark under the water, and panic clogs his throat and his kicking disturbs the silt and he’s horribly certain that a _snake_ brushes his leg at one point, which is frankly pretty alarming, and he dies _thrice_ in the current before the water throws his body into a sheltered alcove from where he can make his sodden way back home.

And _then_ he realizes it’s not even where he _wants_ to be, right now. He doesn’t want to face Yusuf’s cool disappointment in him, the mocking questions about whether he can swim when he damn well can and it’s _Yusuf_ who can’t. He’d rather lie under this cloudy sky and watch the dawn, and anyway it’s not like anyone cares enough to bring him back home—so he does just that.

It’s beautiful. The clouds melt away closer to dawn, and the ones that remain flush violet and red and gold with light, and Nicky _hates_ drowning but he’d drown again for this sight.

He lets his eyes slip shut and dreams his way into another body, fierce and joyous mid-battle, looking across the bloody air at someone as close to her as another person ever could be, every moment thrumming with their intimacy even feet apart as they are, and opens his eyes wide again.

The sky’s the color of a perfect bruise. With stunning clarity, Nicky thinks, _of course he hates me. I could never give him that._

He waits for his clothes to dry and sets off for the nearest town.

The inn at the edge of town is almost closing; he ducks in through the backdoor and asks for water in Genovese and gets a blank look, realizes too late that he’s slipped into a dialect two hundred years out of date, amends it carefully to the newer tongue. “Not from here,” he adds apologetically.

The cook complains about foreigners to him the entire time she hands him scraps from the breakfast fare, which devolves into complaining about her daughter’s ill husband.

He knows a little medicine from the doctors and surgeons in the holy land, tells her he can come back later to take a look. She agrees grudgingly, and sets him to washing the dishes since he has no money to pay for food.

He makes his way to the inn’s dining room afterwards with a mug of tea—or what Europeans call tea, anyway, which is unsatisfactory after the real thing—and finds a corner to sit in, sipping quietly and turning his thoughts over and over again in his head.

Nicky knows he has nowhere to go. But it’s nice to feel alone for a while.

Then a bunch of _soldiers_ filter into the inn, and Nicky’s mood sours rapidly. Is a _little_ time to himself really so much to ask of the universe? But he’s been curious about soldiers since he was one for a while, and he listens in on their conversation.

“—No one wants to explain how a Moslem came _here_ ,” one of them is saying. “This is the back end of fucking nowhere, really, what’s his business?”

“They’re all over in Rome and Florence.”

“This is the _countryside._ ”

“What do they plan to do with him, anyway? Sure we find him, but then what?”

They devolve into a discussion on what one does with a Moslem, but Nicky’s heard enough. He gets up to leave, walking quickly and quietly. 

Not quietly enough. “Hey, you there! Local man!”

Nicky winces and turns around, and quickly decides that he’s the village idiot. “Me?” He says slowly, feigning a speech impediment.

“Oh Lord, let him go already,” someone mutters.

“What?” Nicky says, loud and stupid.

“Have you seen anyone strange here?” The man who called out to Nicky asks. He must be the captain, judging by the rank emblem stitched to his coat.

Nicky stares obviously at them.

“Apart from us,” the captain amends.

“I dunno,” Nicky says vaguely. “Came here by that side,” he flings his arm out randomly, pointing away from his home. “Saw a couple guys with beards walking around, asking for a place to stay. Don’t seen beards like that round much. Them’s what you looking for?”

“Moslems have beards,” one of the soldiers say thoughtfully.

Another one touches his face and flushes. “If I was a Moslem with a beard I’d shave it off,” he protests.

“Quiet, both of you,” the captain snaps. “Well, young man. Thank you for your help,” He tosses a copper coin to Nicky, who promptly pretends to look delighted. As he turns to leave the captain continues, to his men, “We’ll have to split up…”

 _Shit,_ Nicky thinks. He walks out of the town—barely more than a village, really, and gives himself twenty minutes of walking to get out of its line of sight before breaking into a run.

Yusuf is still in bed. Nicky feels a strange moment of loss, and then shakes him awake. “There’s a bunch of Roman soldiers heading this way,” he informs Yusuf, who gives him a bleary look. “They’re looking for you.”

“I’ve fought Romans before,” Yusuf grumbles. “Bunch of idiots with swords. Could take them in my sleep.”

“There’s twenty of them,” Nicky says desperately. Yusuf isn’t taking this as seriously as he should and Nicky doesn’t know why he expected anything different. “You can’t take them all. You don’t have enough weapons.”

“I got me and my sword,” Yusuf snaps, and pulls the blanket over his face.

Yusuf, Nicky remembers in a surge of terrified hysteria, keeps a knife under his pillow.

So Nicky stabs him with it.

“What the _fuck_ was that for?” Yusuf yells, falling out of bed. There’s blood everywhere, in Nicky’s beautiful new house, and he wants to cry already. “Have you _lost your mind_?”

“Not yet,” Nicky says, brittle and sharp as glass. He’s still holding the knife in a death grip.

Yusuf’s old weapons are in the barn. They dig out every one, and Yusuf tests the heft of his halberd with a dark look on his face. 

And he hands Nicky his own sword. “I know you don’t like fighting,” he murmurs. “But I’m the only one that gets to kill you, got it?”

It’s the most overt affection he’s gotten out of Yusuf in a year. Nicky takes the sword. He doesn’t say, _I drowned thrice this morning._ Some battles aren’t worth fighting. They take the weapons inside, and Nicky makes them breakfast and tries to tell himself it’s actually a _good_ thing they don’t have any furniture yet, so they won’t have to clean out the blood.

His hands shake as he washes the knife clean and tucks it into his boots.

They’re on edge for two days, waiting and watching and hardly sleeping.

Then the Romans arrive.

Yusuf’s never guarded his right side too well, Nicky knows, and it’s painfully easy to fit himself into that gap and fight anyone who dares come close. He’s clumsy, a decade out of practice, but they have an edge that the Romans don’t and though it’s Yusuf who kills most of them it’s Nicky who stares the Captain dead in the eye, sees recognition spark a moment before his life fades forever.

He drops the knife at last, panting, and turns around in time to watch Yusuf stare at his left hand as it grows back. “Are you alright?” Nicky asks plaintively.

“Always,” Yusuf says absently.

Nicky thinks about a dark-skinned man dying in a battle and feels a flash of fear, but he doesn’t mention it. They haul out the bodies in silence, dropping them into a ravine. Dump mud over it for hours and hours, and when it’s over they walk back in exhausted silence until Nicky sits down by the side of the road a mile from home, thinking about blood on the walls and unable to go on.

Yusuf sits down next to him. He used to do that all the time. Not in a while, but he’s here now and _alive_ and Nicky hopes the miracle of that will never wear off.

“You fight well, for a Roman,” Yusuf says, an hour later. 

Nicky snorts and shakes his head. “I haven’t been a Roman in two hundred years.”

“That’ll explain it,” Yusuf says uncharitably. Then, “I meant it. You fight well.”

“Not compared to you,” Nicky replies, scrupulously honest and as always, ashamed. “Not compared to _them._ ”

Andromache and Quynh, the dreams of them a long shadow between Yusuf and himself.

“Good enough for me,” Yusuf says, very seriously. He isn’t looking at Nicky at all, but the weight of his words sinks into Nicky’s aching heart. He throws himself impulsively across the distance into Yusuf’s body. “Ow,” Yusuf starts, but his arms come up to hold Nicky close regardless.

Nicky’s shaking. “I thought you _hated_ me,” he confesses, clinging harder. It’s like he can’t keep the words back now that they’ve tasted freedom; the rest come rushing out, tripping over themselves. “I thought you hated me and were ashamed of me and I, I was so _afraid_ you’d decide to leave. I thought they’d take you from me and you wouldn’t even want to _stay_.”

“ _Nicolo_ ,” Yusuf growls, and Nicky stops. “Nicky, you fool. I thought _you_ hated _me._ ”

“ _What_?” Nicky asks faintly. “What would I ever hate _you_ for?”

“Because I’m a killer,” Yusuf says. He’s still holding onto Nicky, like he’ll never let go again. “Because I’ll never be anything else but you, you’re _good._ Why would someone like _you_ want anything to do with me? What could I give you except more pain? I thought you kept me because you pitied me. Because you were too good to leave.”

“I would never,” Nicky protests. “I would _not_ —you have to believe me. I wanted you to like me. I _love_ you. I couldn’t pity—not you. Not like that.” He’s sure he’s not making any sense anymore.

“How did you _ever_ think I dislike you?” Yusuf sputters. “I love _you._ ”

“ _I_ love you,” Nicky argues immediately, and then blushes. “Oh.”

Yusuf pulls back to stare at him, wide-eyed and tired and stinky and _gorgeous._ “Oh.”

“If you’re going to fuck me,” Nicky offers shakily a few moments later. “You’re going to have to do it here. I’m not getting fucked for the first time in a year on a bloody bed.”

“How dare you,” Yusuf says playfully. “A bloody bed is the _height_ of romance—”

“I’m leaving,” Nicky threatens, pulling away. Yusuf yanks him back and kisses him, mouth soft and beard scratchy and welcome anyway because it’s _him_. Nicky melts willingly into it, lets himself be laid out and undressed and opened up with spit-wet fingers. Whimpers when Yusuf pushes into him, close and tight and tender. “Please,” he whispers. “Yusuf, _Yusuf_. I thought I was alone.” 

He lets it out like an apology, and Yusuf mouths at his shoulder worshipfully. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry, my dear. I should have loved you louder.”

Nicky cries out wetly, partly because Yusuf thrust just right against him and partly because of the words. “I didn’t know how to talk to you,” he says, still unable to believe Yusuf is listening now. “I didn’t know I _could_.”

“I’m _always_ here,” Yusuf murmurs. He’s still fucking into Nicky, slow and deep and almost savagely loving. “For you, always.”

“You know I could never hate you, right?” Nicky asks, just to make sure. Clenches around Yusuf’s cock so the words trail off into a moan. “Not you. You’re all I have, but—” he sobs “—I’d love you even if I had everything. I’d _kill_ for you, Yusuf. As much as it takes.”

Yusuf cries, then, comes inside Nicky with a low sound and then collapses over him. Nicky runs his hands through Yusuf’s dark hair and kisses his face in wordless wonder. Kisses away every tear until there’s none.

They walk slowly in the dark, back to the home they built.

**Author's Note:**

> i am on tumblr @ciaran!! yell at me about these boys. there will probably be uhh another fic in this series which will include nile because i love her and because i like trilogies, they're neat. so you should come tell me on tumblr what you'd like to see in it. and at some point when i am free of other obligations i WILL write my 8k of disastrous andy/booker fic. that is a threat. also pls comment if you liked this!!


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